It is interesting that digital and digitalis are of the same root.. Digital is... you know. Digitalis is a substance extracted from the herbs of the foxglove line. It can be beneficial and it can be also deadly. It depends on the case,time and dosage.

So is digital technology. Mr. A. Duncan, our education secretary had just announced the accelerated campaign to transfer all the K-12 textbooks to digital format ASAP. And he referred to South Koreans as an example.

There is always something odd about that position 'education secretary'. It is like a 'secretary of happiness'. Truly speaking, education is not about textbooks and software. It is about a way of thinking. I would argue that even if we here now had no computers at all and all children would have used ink-pots the level of education could be very high indeed if we, for instance, had teachers talking to each other and also (yes) if we had universal health care. And I also would argue that even 1000 Mr. Duncans will not improve our education level even by 1% even if we digitize all the books from math to sexual education and also animate them so that numbers smile at us. Education is not about that.

Education is about a way of thinking. That means the process must promote THINKING all the time. I dare to say that the old- fashioned book and notebook, the necessity to write neatly by hand, the calligraphy, the good handwriting, the feeling of approaching something done by others- all of that promotes thinking. On the contrary, the glimmer of the screen, the snap pictures instead of text, huge pdf documents which no one can read, the usage of images instead of a text, the anonymity of the pixel- all of that creates a bunch of imbeciles who then listen to Netanyahu showing them a picture of the powder bomb, What goes around-comes around. If you take uneducated populous and put that lack of education into a digital format you will get the generation of Digitally Stupid.

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And what about South Koreans? I believe they are doing it correctly. If you have universal health coverage and national education standards- it is time to go digital. But I bet their kids still study calligraphy.